Various cycle devices have been devised for persons confined to a wheelchair such as parapalegics which have full use of their upper portion of their body, including their hands and arms. U.S. Pat. No. 3,485,510 to Merlan, U.S. Pat. No. 4,316,616 to Boivin and U.S. Pat. No. 4,471,972 to Young show a cycle device which is attached to a wheelchair and has pedals and a chain drive for allowing a person in the wheelchair to use his or her hands to propel a device from place to place. One of the problems with these devices in general is that they either preclude use of the wheelchair itself, such as in the Merlan device, or they are extremely difficult to hook up to a wheelchair or unhook from a wheelchair, such as in the Boivan or Young devices, so that it is very difficult to switch from one to the other.
Various other bicycle or tricycle devices such as those shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,848,891 to Vittori, U.S. Pat. No. 4,109,927 to Harper, U.S. Pat. No. 4,152,005 to Vanore, and U.S. Pat. No. 4,502,705 to Weaver all show cycles which use hand pedals for powering the cycle from place to place. These cycles work fine for that purpose, but do not allow ready access to a wheelchair when such is necessary. If these devices were to be used by a wheelchair bound person to be driven to the place of employment, to a shopping center or a grocery store or the like, they would not be useful to go inside and move around in rooms or in stores or office buildings. Consequently, it is not practical for a wheelchair-bound person to use these cycles for the purpose of going to places like that.
Consequently, there is a need for a hand powered cycle which would be useful to allow the wheelchair-bound person to go from place to place, but still have his or her wheelchair readily available for use in homes, offices, shopping centers or stores without having a tedious and awkward task of trying to disassemble the chair from the hand pedal actuation mechanism.